Laughs compete with dirty talk in 'Fifty Shades' parody

Feb. 20, 2014

Updated 4:34 p.m.

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A scene from '50 Shades! The Musical" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. CLIFFORD ROLES

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“50 Shades! The Musical,” which opens Feb. 25 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, is the brainchild of a frenetic six-person team that wrote it in a blazing hurry over three weeks in 2012 for the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. MICHAEL BROSILOW

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"50 Shades" starts with a framing device: a woman's book club in a fairly conservative town has decided to read “Fifty Shades of Grey.” The device was convenient to introduce audience members who didn't know the novel – especially men – to become familiar with its details. MICHAEL BROSILOW

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A scene from "50 Shades! The Musical." Despite its unexpected success in Edinburgh, the show was altered for its American tour, which has been going nonstop since April 2013. MICHAEL BROSILOW

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A scene from "50 Shades! The Musical." The show opens Off-Broadway next month. MICHAEL BROSILOW

For those old enough to remember the days when Playboy was carefully hidden in the bottom of dad’s dresser drawer, the widespread success of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy is as good a sign as any that the world is a radically different place now.

Women of every nationality, religion and political stripe have embraced the tales of sexual and personal freedom through the practice of bondage, discipline, sadomasochism and other unholy acts that Hugh Hefner’s innocently naughty magazine never mentioned. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” published in 2011, and its two 2012 sequels, “Fifty Shades Darker” and “Fifty Shades Freed,” have sold 90 million copies worldwide and been translated into 52 languages.

E L James’ erotic novels have been anointed with another prize of mega-success: a musical parody.

“50 Shades! The Musical,” which opens Tuesday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, is the brainchild of a frenetic six-person team that wrote it in a blazing hurry over three weeks in 2012 for the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. They’re part of a Chicago-based theater group called Baby Wants Candy. (The writing team also penned 11 songs with titles that you’d expect of such a travesty: “They Get Nasty,” “Red Room,” “I Don’t Make Love” and “There's a Hole Inside of Me.”)

“It was very much like a TV writer’s room,” said Emily Dorezas, the show’s director, who was one of those fevered creators and is the executive producer for Baby Wants Candy. “Composer-wise, everyone had a hand in it, although my contribution was more on the book side. It was like triage. We were all in there sweating with our sleeves rolled up.”

Dorezas, a 32-year-old Maryland native whose background is in standup comedy, hadn’t even read the book she was parodying.

“I feel like I was the last person in the world to read it. I knew that most of my female friends had read it, and my family. For that reason it’s the kind of book that even if you know nothing about it, you know everything. You can’t get away from it.”

Dorezas was more interested in the strange consequences of “Grey’s” popularity. “My friend told me that hardware stores were running out of certain kinds of rope. And I read an article about it from the E.R. perspective. Hospitals were being inundated with people who had hurt themselves in strange places. They started calling them ‘Grey accidents.’”

Guys love it, too

The story starts with a framing device: a woman’s book club in a fairly conservative town has decided to read “Fifty Shades of Grey.” The device was convenient to introduce audience members who didn’t know the novel – especially men – to become familiar with its details.

“That’s how we bring everyone up to speed on the content,” Dorezas said. “It proved to be very convenient.”

Christian Grey, the mysterious sexual god at the center of “Fifty Shades,” is front and center in the parody, too, but Dorezas didn’t want to say too much about the character, who in the book is vastly wealthy, drop-dead handsome and kinky as a slinky.

“There has to be an element of surprise” to Grey’s incarnation in her show, Dorezas said. “It’s definitely a big part of the fun. Of course, we play with him a lot. But our Christian is still very hot.”

Despite its unexpected success in Edinburgh, the show was altered for its American tour, which has been going nonstop since April 2013.

“It changed a lot,” Dorezas recalled. “We had a really large cast in Edinburgh but it wasn’t as functional as it needed to be. We had (fewer) songs. And it was much, much dirtier. It has more heart now, and more focus. It’s more to the point and there’s a much better story. We used the book club to better effect.”

Dorezas and her crew also came to see that people had to relate to the book club members, who they realized were a reflection of the mostly middle-aged female audience. “Those characters are basically a mirror, so we realized that people have to like them and sympathize with them. This story is a journey of discovery for them.”

And for men, too.

“I see a lot of guys who look like they’re dragged in (to see ‘50 Shades’). But many of them are pleasantly surprised. It’s not ‘Peyton Place’; it’s pretty raunchy. They can get their heads around that.”

She has been thanked afterwards, Dorezas said.

“The messages we get privately from guys is, ‘Wow, I had no idea what this was about. The benefits at home after seeing this show are off the chain. The party hasn’t stopped for four days!’”

Dorezas knows the ride she is on could end soon. Despite the popularity of the show’s national U.S. tour, its attraction could quickly fade. “I don’t know when, but some day soon people will get over this phenomenon,” she said.

Or maybe not.

“We go into previews in New York on Friday and open on March 12 at the Electra Theatre (an off-Broadway house in Times Square),” Dorezas said. “We’ll do eight shows a week. Perhaps it will go to Broadway. The movie version (of James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey”) comes out in February 2015. Hopefully we can keep everything going until then. After that, who knows?”

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